Recently, the Goethe-Institut New York contacted us via Twitter and sent us the following image of some of Arendt's writings housed in its library.

Here is what Katherine Lorimer, Librarian at the Goethe-Institut New York, had to say about the image:

"Within the scope of the Goethe-Institut New York Library’s collection of German literature, art, film, history and language, you can find the works of notable German thinkers such as Hannah Arendt. We have close to 25 volumes of Arendt’s work – both in German and English – including essays and correspondences with her peers."

We want to thank Katherine and the Goethe-Institut New York for sending along this photograph, and we want to express how much we value the Goethe-Institut New York for working to present a clear and realistic image of Germany, forge partnerships between individuals and organizations based in the United States and Germany, and undermine existing prejudices and stereotypes. Thank you for all that you do!

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

"The monuments to the 'Unknown Soldier' after World War I bear testimony to the then still existing need for glorification, for finding a 'who,' an identifiable somebody whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. The frustration of this wish and the unwillingness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was actually nobody inspired the erection of the monuments to the 'unknown,' to all those whom the war had failed to make known and had robbed thereby, not of their achievement, but of their human dignity."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt places works of art the in center of the common world. While scholars have drawn attention to her references to such literary authors as Rilke and Kafka in recent years, little notice has been made of her discussion of other types of artwork. Among these, her references to monuments illuminate a connection between the aesthetics and action in the political realm.

Jeffrey Champlin is Fellow, Center for Civic Engagement and Human Rights at Bard and Program Head of Literature and Society, Bard College at Al-Quds University. He received his Ph D from New York University and has taught at NYU and Middlebury College. His work focuses on strategies and ruptures of representation in political theory, literature, and aesthetics.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Zeynep Tufekci takes a critical look at a recent study (by Facebook) showing that the social media's algorithm reduces the number of "cross-cutting" posts that we see, posts that challenge our political beliefs. In other words, if you're liberal, Facebook highlights liberal posts, and vice versa for conservatives. It gives the people what they want, or what they think you want. "Here's the key finding: Facebook researchers conclusively show that Facebook's newsfeed algorithm decreases ideologically diverse, cross-cutting content people see from their social networks on Facebook by a measurable amount. The researchers report that exposure to diverse content is suppressed by Facebook's algorithm by 8% for self-identified liberals and by 5% for self-identified conservatives. Or, as Christian Sandvig puts it, 'the algorithm filters out 1 in 20 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified conservative sees (or 5%) and 1 in 13 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified liberal sees (8%).' You are seeing fewer news items that you'd disagree with which are shared by your friends because the algorithm is not showing them to you.... Overall, from all aspects, this study confirms that for this slice of politically-engaged sub-population, Facebook's algorithm is a modest suppressor of diversity of content people see on Facebook, and that newsfeed placement is a profoundly powerful gatekeeper for click-through rates. This, not all the roundabout conversation about people's choices, is the news." The censoring of oppositional content is subtle and minor, and yet it persists. All of this means that people with different politics will actually see different posts, making them susceptible to meaningfully different realities.

Business Week asked Paul Ford a simple question: "We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, 'Can you tell me what code is?' 'No,' I said. 'First of all, I'm not good at the math. I'm a programmer, yes, but I'm an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.'" 31,000 words and hours later, you realize Ford is telling the truth but answering like a coder. You can't read his long essay--interspersed with video explanations and offers to learn basic coding ("We can't teach you to code, but we can hold your hand through a live-fire exercise. It will be dry, because code is dry until it 'clicks,' and often even then. Want to give it a shot?") without gaining some insight into the beauty, chaos, complexity, and importance of answering the unanswerable question. "A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two. Tick, operate (an operation might be addition or subtraction) on those two numbers and put the resulting number in box one. Tick, check if the result is zero, and if it is, go to some other box and follow a new set of instructions. You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can; you just can't do those things billions of times per second. And those billions of tiny operations add up. They can cause a phone to boop, elevate an elevator, or redirect a missile. That raw speed makes it possible to pull off not one but multiple sleights of hand, card tricks on top of card tricks. Take a bunch of pulses of light reflected from an optical disc, apply some math to unsqueeze them, and copy the resulting pile of expanded impulses into some memory cells--then read from those cells to paint light on the screen. Millions of pulses, 60 times a second. That's how you make the rubes believe they're watching a movie.... You can make computers do wonderful things, but you need to understand their limits. They're not all-powerful, not conscious in the least. They're fast, but some parts--the processor, the RAM--are faster than others--like the hard drive or the network connection. Making them seem infinite takes a great deal of work from a lot of programmers and a lot of marketers. The turn-of-last-century British artist William Morris once said you can't have art without resistance in the materials. The computer and its multifarious peripherals are the materials. The code is the art."

Jennifer Gonnerman's eulogy for Kalief Browder, a young New Yorker who spent three years in jail without being charged with a crime, is an indictment of the whole criminal justice system and specifically of the cruel and unusual technique of solitary confinement: "He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell. In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable. Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, 'because it was watching me.'" Ta-Nehisi Coates further contextualizes Browder's short life in terms of the way the criminal justice system treats African American men.

Josh Marshall wonders at the crazy complexities of Rachel Dolezal's existence, including the fantastic levels at which she, born white, made up a past and present life for herself as a black woman. Against criticism that she may have claimed blackness only when it suited her or that she embraced blackness to get a job at the NAACP, Marshall writes, "Maybe Dolezal had a separate life as a white person or put herself down as a white on a home loan application. (Obviously whatever her intentions she had the freedom which dark-skinned African-Americans lack to just become white again whenever she wanted.) But that's not at all the impression I get of this woman by reading her story. I get the impression that in her mind Dolezal actually had at some level become black, possibly even to the level of some aspect of body dysmorphia. (The counter to that perception, though not necessarily invalidating it, is that according to her adopted brother she warned or perhaps even threatened family members not to expose her.)" Her embrace of her blackness even led to hate crimes being committed against her (at least some of which she fabricated). But the basic point that Marshall insists on is that Dolezal is simply a liar living in an increasingly fictional reality: "I read the Rachel Dolezal story before it got picked up by any national outlets in the original story in the Coeur d'Alene Press on Thursday (yes, epic aggregation fail ... what can I say I was traveling). If you've only read pick-ups or follow-ups, read the original if you get a chance. It's an amazing piece of reporting and will make you appreciate what a great thing small paper journalism is--just an amazingly detailed piece of shoe-leather reporting. Since I read it I've been trying to think what if anything there is to add beyond the peristaltic WTF that seems to be the near universal response. So let me just go with bullet points. Point 1: The one simple thing is the online debate about whether Dolezal is simply 'transracial' like Caitlyn Jenner is transgender. No. It's not like that. In fact, I think we can dispense with this entirely because I have not seen anyone suggesting this anywhere online who wasn't just some wingnut concern-trolling transgenderism and frankly racial identity itself. You can dress yourself up however you want and identify however you want. But when you start making up black parents and all the rest that went into this story, you're just lying. Full stop." Dolezal's story may raise fascinating questions about race and identity. But let's remember that making up coherent fantasies that one holds to in the face of facts is dangerous, demonstrating a disdain for reality. To rewrite history, even one's personal history, diminishes the power of factual truth and habituates one to living in coherent fictions, which Hannah Arendt argues is one of the root causes of totalitarianism.

Anne Fausto-Sterling wonders how we're supposed to know what's good for us, especially in light of "new government guidelines released in February" that reverse a long-standing view that cholesterol should be limited. Suddenly, she writes, "It seems I am free to eat eggs, lobster, and oysters without fear for my life. How, in a mere five years, could our ideas about nutrition do such an about-face? There are several possible explanations. First, it may be really hard to do a good study linking cholesterol intake to ill health. Over time scientists may have designed better and better study methods, until, finally, a more justified truth has emerged. Second, vested interests--giant agribusinesses (purveyors of lobster, eggs, and well-larded beef) and pharmaceutical companies (purveyors of cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins)--may have influenced the guidelines. Third, foods have changed. Perhaps newer studies differ from older ones because an egg circa 1960 is not an egg circa 2000. Today's chickens are more inbred. Their own food intake has changed, possibly altering the cholesterol in their eggs. Fourth, we have started to focus on human metabolism at the level of multi-organ interactions. Instead of treating diabetes as a disease of the pancreas and obesity as a problem of fat storage, we now talk about a metabolic syndrome, which links high blood sugar, high blood pressure, excess midriff fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels to increased risk of heart disease and diabetes. As conceptions of disease change, so do ideas about the sources of disease. And fifth, the tried-and-true 'all of the above.'"

Zach Pontz considers Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation, a retelling of Albert Camus's The Stranger: "Meursault has divorced himself from history, has, as he tells the investigator tasked with questioning him following his crime, given up analyzing himself. Assigning meaning to the world is something he has lost the energy to do. Harun, on the other hand, is driven by the desire to impose form on a lifetime of quasi-intelligible incidents, the foremost of which is the murder of his brother and its aftermath, which has sentenced its victims--Musa, Harun, their mother--to anonymity. 'There's not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward,' Harun tells his interlocutor. 'The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance.' If Meursault is the stranger, Harun's brother is the invisible man. But the tragedy here is that Harun understands he can't will his brother into being, that he's forever been written out of history by Meursault, in whose book 'The word "Arab" appears twenty-five times but not a single name, not once.' In this way does Daoud, a popular columnist in Algeria who has become a vocal critic of the government, set up one of his main theses: that both the French colonial system, the French Algerian population of which (known as pied-noirs) populated Algeria for a century and a half, and Algerians themselves are complicit in the country's current state of affairs."

Dwight Garner shares the work of Juan Felipe Herrera, the newly appointed US poet laureate: "Mostly, though, you'd like to hear him at the National Mall because his work is built to be spoken aloud. His best poems are polyrhythmic and streaked with a nettling wit. He puts you in mind of something the writer Dagoberto Gilb once said: 'My favorite ethnic group is smart.' Witness Mr. Herrera's long poem, '187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border (Remix),' for example. In it, he flies a freak flag, in a manner that resembles a blend of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Allen Ginsberg, on behalf of his determined politics. Among those reasons Mexicanos can't cross: 'Because it's better to be rootless, unconscious & rapeable'; 'Because the pesticides on our skin are still glowing'; 'Because pan dulce feels sexual, especially conchas & the elotes'; 'Because we'll build a sweat lodge in front of Bank of America'; 'Because we're locked into Magical Realism'; and 'Because Freddy Fender wasn't Baldemar Huerta's real name.'"

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens uses the protests in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD to understand both the differences and the relations between violence and power in the Quote of the Week. Military strategist Carl von Clausewitz discusses the effect that rules and principles have on a thinking man in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate an image of a graduate student's personal "shelf library" of Arendt in this week's Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Edward Snowden writes in the New York Times that the public is finally waking up to the dangers of surveillance and the need to protect privacy. "Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.'s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated. This is the power of an informed public. Ending the mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen, but it is only the latest product of a change in global awareness. Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers." None of this would have happened if Snowden had not blown the whistle and gone public with his revelations about NSA activities. As David Cole writes this week in the New York Review of Books, "Sunsets require sunshine. That may be the most enduring lesson from the Senate's passage on Tuesday of the USA Freedom Act, which will bring an end to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. If Edward Snowden had not revealed the NSA's sweeping surveillance of Americans, Congress would have simply renewed Section 215, the USA Patriot Act provision that the NSA relied on before its expiration on June 1--as Congress had done on seven previous occasions since 2001. But Snowden's leaking of top secret NSA documents let Americans in on the previously secret fact that their government was collecting all of their phone data, without regard to whether they had ever engaged in any terrorist, criminal, or even suspicious activity. As a result, Congress has now imposed restrictions on national security surveillance for the first time since the September 11 attacks."

In a wide ranging conversation with Neil Gaiman about the relevance of literary genre in contemporary writing, Kazuo Ishiguro suggests a reason why fantasy seems to be coming out of the shadows: "But maybe the stigma against fantasy is something much wider than in the fiction world. Since industrial times began, it's sort of true to say that children have been allowed a sanctioned world where fantasy and imagination is deemed to be fine, in fact, almost desirable. But then when they get to a certain age, they have to start getting prepared to be units of the labour force. And so, society has to start getting the fantasy element out of the children, so that they can become factory workers, soldiers, white-collar workers, whatever, because it's seen to be not useful to the overall economic enterprise to have children growing up maintaining that fantasy element. You don't want people who are too dreamy or who are imagining things: you want them to accept this is the nitty-gritty of real life, that they've just got to get on with it. I'm not suggesting we're necessarily being manipulated by some sinister government or anything; it's just there in society. Parents will naturally discourage children once they get to a certain age from continuing with the fantasy element in their lives; schools will, too. It becomes taboo in the society at large. Maybe the reason it's been loosening up, and the stigma is going away to some extent in the last 25 years or so, is that the nature of our capitalist enterprise has changed. We're no longer factory workers, white-collar workers, soldiers, and so on. And with the advent of blue-sky thinking, the new tech industries that have led the way in the last two decades seem to require some kind of imagination. Perhaps people are beginning to think there is some economic use in actually allowing us to indulge in what was once deemed childish fantasy. I sound like some sort of Seventies sociology professor, but I feel there's something in this."

True long-form journalism in mainstream publications is a rarity, but Adrian Chen's investigative essay on a shadowy Russian agency that fabricates stories, spreads misinformation, and destabilizes facts is proof that the medium can still exist. Chen's tale melds geopolitics with philosophy; it unfolds slowly, but it is gripping. After a few choice examples of the way Russia ruthlessly attacks inconvenient facts and manufactures alternative realities, Chen concludes: "All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. 'The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,' says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. 'It's not true since at least three years.' Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction. 'The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won't want to touch it,' Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. 'You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it's very important what is their first impression.' The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. 'It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags,' says Ilya Klishin, the web editor for the independent television station TV Rain who, in 2011, created the Facebook page for the antigovernment protests. Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space. In the midst of such a war, the Runet (as the Russian Internet is often called) can be an unpleasant place for anyone caught in the crossfire. Soon after I met Leonid Volkov, he wrote a post on his Facebook wall about our interview, saying that he had spoken with someone from The New York Times. A former pro-Kremlin blogger later warned me about this. Kremlin allies, he explained, monitored Volkov's page, and now they would be on guard. 'That was not smart,' he said."

Miya Tokumitsu, citing Frank Lloyd Wright, calls out the recent trend of marketing "artisanal" and "homemade" goods for obscuring certain economic realities: "The ongoing turn-of-the-last-century nostalgia spell, fueling contemporary markets for mustache wax and obscure herbaceous liquors--excuse me, tonics (tonics that I find delightful, by the way)--shows no sign of waning anytime soon. Yet as others have argued, this obsession with the artisanal production of yesteryear is hardly unproblematic, ignoring as it does the widespread racial, gender, and class oppression that it entailed and still perpetuates. As Rachel Laudan explains, in casting foodstuffs like handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals as more wholesome, both nutritionally and morally, we overlook the fact that these delicacies necessitate hours of physical labor--labor that was traditionally performed by women and poorly paid agricultural and domestic workers. Nostalgia is a form of remembrance, but one that simultaneously demands willful forgetting. And that is why it is so dangerous--it always runs the risk of justifying and replicating the injustices of past eras by making them invisible."

Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel wonder at why ISIS and other Islamist groups are so fond of poetry: "It may seem curious that some of the most wanted men in the world should take the time to fashion poems in classical metres and monorhyme--far easier to do in Arabic than in English, but something that still requires practice. And these are only the most obvious signs of the jihadis' dedication to form. The poems are full of allusions, recherché terms, and baroque devices. Acrostics, in which the first letters of successive lines spell out names or phrases, are especially popular. One of al-Nasr's poems, a declaration of her commitment to ISIS, is based on the group's acronym, Daesh. ('Daesh' is generally a derogatory label, and al-Nasr's embrace of it is a gesture of defiance.) The militants' evident delight in their virtuosity turns their poems into performances. The poets are making sure that we know they are poets--laying claim to the special authority that comes with poetry's status in Arabic culture. Yet behind the swagger there are powerful anxieties: all jihadis have elected to set themselves apart from the wider society, including their families and their religious communities. This is often a difficult choice, with lasting consequences. By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging." It is worth in this context recalling Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht, where she observed that "poets have not often made good, reliable citizens." Perversity is an artistic privilege as long as it produces good art. The problem is that once poets become political, they turn their gaze from truth to persuasion. This is why Brecht's odes praising Stalin are both politically odious and artistically sterile. It may be worth asking why ISIS members turn to poetry, but one shouldn't confuse political rhymes with poetry.

In a retrospective on the work of sculptor Duane Hanson, Douglas Coupland suggests that the selfie may come to have an important place in the art world: "In fact, could there be any work out there more selfie-friendly than Hanson's? Technology has inverted some of the rules of appreciating art. What was once forbidden in the museum (the photo) is now encouraged. The eyeballs of Hanson's figures no longer look out into space, but at the viewer's camera, along with the viewer. What was once a power imbalance--the institution and the viewer--instead becomes intimate, curious, democratic and highly engaged. A new museum archive category seems to be emerging: a continuum of 'selfieness'. At one end of the selfie spectrum is, say, the work of Donald Judd. It's hard to imagine taking a selfie with one of his minimalist wall pieces. And at the other end of the selfie continuum, we have Hanson and, say, Jeff Koons. Selfieness is no indication of a work's depth or anything else except, well, its selfieness. But whatever selfieness is, it's possibly what institutions are looking for to help them navigate through the next 20 years. So maybe it's not so odd a category after all."

Gideon Lewis-Kraus takes a look at much bemoaned computational translations and wonders if they'll ever be any good and, for that matter, what "good" means in this context: "Though some researchers still endeavor to train their computers to translate Dante with panache, the brute-force method seems likely to remain ascendant. This statistical strategy, which supports Google Translate and Skype Translator and any other contemporary system, has undergone nearly three decades of steady refinement. The problems of semantic ambiguity have been lessened--by paying pretty much no attention whatsoever to semantics. The English word 'bank,' to use one frequent example, can mean either 'financial institution' or 'side of a river,' but these are two distinct words in French. When should it be translated as 'banque,' when as 'rive'? A probabilistic model will have the computer examine a few of the other words nearby. If your sentence elsewhere contains the words 'money' or 'robbery,' the proper translation is probably 'banque.' (This doesn't work in every instance, of course--a machine might still have a hard time with the relatively simple sentence 'A Parisian has to have a lot of money to live on the Left Bank.') Furthermore, if you have a good probabilistic model of what standard sentences in a language do and don't look like, you know that the French equivalent of 'The box is in the ink-filled writing implement' is encountered approximately never. Contemporary emphasis is thus not on finding better ways to reflect the wealth or intricacy of the source language but on using language models to smooth over garbled output. A good metaphor for the act of translation is akin to the attempt to answer the question 'What player in basketball corresponds to the quarterback?' Current researchers believe that you don't really need to know much about football to answer this question; you just need to make sure that the people who have been drafted to play basketball understand the game's rules. In other words, knowledge of any given source language--and the universal cultural encyclopedia casually encoded within it--is growing ever more irrelevant."

Orin Kerr has this nugget in the Washington Post: "If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy. Yikes."

This week on the Blog, Philip Walsh discusses some of the startling conclusions Hannah Arendt arrived at with regards to moral philosophy in the Quote of the Week. French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal offers up his comments on human nature in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate several copies and translations of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" found in the Hannah Arendt Collection in this week's Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Sherrilyn Ifill delivered the commencement address at Bard College on Saturday, and I was honored to present her as a candidate for her honorary degree as a Doctor in Law. In her speech, Ifill told Bard graduates, "to exercise true citizenship, you will be obligated to help our nation grapple with its most vexing and starkest contradictions. You are called to help us determine whether we are truly committed to equality, dignity, fairness, second chances, reason, justice, and peace. Because it is not after all just that we incarcerate two million people, more people than any other nation in the world, it is that we have made a culture of imprisoning our fellow citizens, and, in creating this culture, we have demeaned ourselves, we have created television programs and forms of humor that focus on violence in prison, and we have condoned the practice of assigning prisoners to months, years, and, in some instances, even decades of solitary confinement with the full knowledge that this will strip them of their sanity." Ifill then ended her passionate speech with a personal reflection on her recent escape from tragedy. "Finally, I wish to share one other thing. You may know that I was a passenger on Amtrak train 188 that derailed and crashed last Tuesday night." She related how, by accident, she was not in the car that suffered the worst of the crash. She concluded: "I emerged from this awful accident with a broken collarbone, a concussion, and some emotional scars to be sure, but I'm grateful to be alive and relatively unhurt. And, while I'm still processing much of what happened and trying to understand what I should make of this extraordinary experience, I do know this much: committing your life to making meaningful art, or teaching the disadvantaged, or to, as I have, racial, gender, or LGBT justice issues; devoting yourself to ending religious intolerance, or to protecting the resources of our precious planet, to finding the cure for a terrible disease, to inventing some life-changing device or code, to composing transcendent pieces of music, does not exempt you from what I believe is the ultimate command of the universe, the ultimate command in my faith of God: to live and to love. Not just to go through the motions, not to work relentlessly until the very joy of life is stripped away, as I was in peril of doing before this accident, not to forget to breathe country air deeply, not to say you have no time for long walks or long hugs or long goodbyes. We are called first and foremost to live, and to nurture that magic circle of what I call favorites--that tight group of family and friends to whom you will instinctively reach out when calamity happens and who will surround you with their love and get you back on your feet to face the challenges and work ahead. This to, the nurturing of this group is a kind of work and you must take it as seriously and apply yourself to it as diligently as you will to the work of responsible citizenship that your community and your country demands of you. So, class of 2015, I am excited to know that you will be leading our community, our country, and what we will become. I have confidence that you are prepared and committed, engaged and unafraid to do this great work."

Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the re-working of Mein Kampf that is the literary sensation of the last few years, reflects on the humanist origins of Anders Behring Breivik, the young Norwegian mass murderer. Noting Breivik's admitted ideological justifications for his crimes, Knausgaard suggests that his motives were grounded in an existential loneliness. "However, almost everything else regarding Breivik and his crime points away from the political and the ideological and toward the personal. He made himself a sort of military commander's uniform, in which he photographed himself before the crime; he consistently referred to a large organization, of which he claimed to be a prominent member but which does not exist; in his manifesto he interviews himself as if he were a hero; and the impression this gives is of a person who has erected a make-believe reality, in which his significance is undisputed. The way in which he carried out his crime, and the way his thoughts contextualized it, resembles role-playing, rather than political terrorism. The solitude this implies is enormous, not to mention the need for self-assertion. The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us.... He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me." Knausgaard's attention to Breivik's loneliness recalls Hannah Arendt's reflections on the origins of totalitarian thinking in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. At one point, Knausgaard even turns to Arendt's report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and writes: "Knowing what he did that summer day almost four years ago, when he walked around an island full of youths and shot everyone he saw, many face to face--indeed, when the court reviewed the autopsy reports, we learned of a girl whose lips remained unscathed, though she was shot in the mouth, because Breivik shot her at close range while she presumably screamed for help or for mercy--and knowing the consequences that his actions have had for the affected families, for us his list of complaints is, in its triviality, almost unbearable to read. It is as if Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil had, in Breivik's case, received an additional twist. Adolf Eichmann, the man whom Arendt wrote about, belonged to an organization and a bureaucracy and a structure, all of which he obediently served, and which protected him from ultimate insight into the consequences of his actions. In contrast, from the very first moment Breivik was utterly alone, and his smallness and wretchedness, which were, in a way, grotesquely inflated by his actions, make it all the more difficult to reconcile oneself to the crime, which the media have termed 'the worst attack on Norwegian soil since the Second World War.'" The focus on bureaucratic structure reflects a subtle misunderstanding of Arendt's account, one in which it is Eichmann's role as a bureaucrat, a cog, that takes pride of place. Arendt repeatedly rejects this explanation, one she attributes to Eichmann and finds at best only partially true. Bureaucracy matters insofar as it diffuses responsibility and institutes what Arendt calls the "rule of nobody." But the core of Eichmann's evil was his desire, his need, for meaning, his overriding loneliness and his need to belong, to find significance in a world that renders people superfluous. That Knausgaard sees with prescience.

Laurie Rojas interviews the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, whose exhibition in connection with this year's 12th Havana Biennial is based on a public reading of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Bruguera has had her passport confiscated and is living in legal limbo for months since she arrived in Cuba to stage a public performance in which everyday people were invited to speak freely for one minute in in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. Her response: "Starting with an open session at her home on Wednesday, 20 May at 10am, and continuing for 100 consecutive hours, Bruguera will read from Arendt's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951. She has invited the public to join in the marathon reading, and plans to hold group discussions. The Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism, as Bruguera has named the project, aims to be a platform for research and teaching 'the practical application' of socially engaged art. Bruguera says she wants the event to be 'entirely independent' from the biennial and completely non-commercial."

Nicholas Carr argues that we should not rush to replace human conductors with robots in the wake of the Amtrak train derailment. "In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration noted that overreliance on automation has become a major factor in air disasters and urged airlines to give pilots more opportunities to fly manually. The best way to make flying even safer than it already is, the research suggests, may be to transfer some responsibility away from computers and back to people. Where humans and machines work in concert, more automation is not always better. We're in this together, our computers and ourselves. Even if engineers create automated systems that can handle every possible contingency--far from a sure bet--it will be years before the systems are fully in place. In aviation, it would take decades to replace or retrofit the thousands of planes in operation, all of which were designed to have pilots in their cockpits. The same goes for roads and rails. Infrastructure doesn't change overnight. We should view computers as our partners, with complementary abilities, not as our replacements. What we'll lose if we rush to curtail our involvement in difficult work are the versatility and wisdom that set us apart from machines."

Before considering the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence posited by the recent movies Her and Ex Machina, Daniel Mendelsohn traces the literary history of the robot all the way back to ancient Greece: "Twenty centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer's fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their monotonous, slave-like jobs; on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot. The latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical parable about slave rebellion--certainly one of the historical realities that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti--which introduced the word 'robot' into the world's literary lexicon--is derived from the word for 'servitude,' the kind of labor that serfs owed their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, 'slave.' We have come full circle to Aristotle."

Stan Perksy considers what we know and don't know about our selves and wonders what this means for our understanding of ourselves: "We also know (or think we know) that a self is not a physical object. It's not as though there is a little homunculus inside you or a mini-person sitting inside the mini-cab of a mini-crane, say, moving your limbs and mind. So, a self is a mental entity which comprises, refers to, or represents you, and includes your experiences, memories, beliefs, 'character,' interests, knowledge, and everything else that goes into making up an identifiable 'you.' There is a set of terms, such as 'mind,' 'consciousness,' 'I,' 'me,' 'identity,' 'beliefs,' 'personality,' 'thoughts,' and many more--some of them synonyms for, or related to, or overlapping with the notion of 'self'--in which we carry on this discussion of who and what we are. The immediate questions that flow from these ideas and these various mental entities are, What, exactly, is a 'mental entity,' and what is the status of mental entities in relation to 'reality'? It seems to be the case (I'm using words and phrases like 'seems,' 'appears,' and 'as far as we know' to indicate how modest our understanding is of how all this works) that a self is not a physical object in the ordinary sense, though its existence is directly dependent on a physical object, the brain, and it's not a spiritual entity in whatever sense we use that term. It, at best, seems to be quasi-autonomous, and has the ability to reflect on itself and possibly the power to change itself."

In a review of Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Meghan O'Gieblyn draws a lesson about where the shaming comes from and why some people seem to take such glee in it: "If there is a political lesson to take from Ronson's book, it is that too often the act of shaming is not a launch pad for social change but rather a cathartic alternative to it. When Sacco and Stone were fired from their jobs, the tone of their shamers took on the triumphant tenor of a civil rights victory, as though the world were a step closer to purging its remaining bad apples. But this attitude ignores the systemic nature of oppression; it personalizes social and political ills. In an op-ed on the Sacco incident, Roxane Gay expresses just this concern. 'The world is full of unanswered injustice and more often than not we choke on it,' she writes. 'When you consider everything we have to fight, it makes sense that so many people rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet. In this one small way, we are, for a moment, less impotent.'"

This week on the Blog, Nicholas Tampio discusses how Arendt's essay in response to the 1957 events at Little Rock High School promotes the diffusion of power in a democracy in the Quote of the Week. Humanist and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus reflects on thinking and action in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Hannah Arendt's collection of the writings of political theorist Hans Morgenthau in this week's Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is a curator and visual artist who collaborates with people all over the world to create socially engaged art. For one of her projects, Two Up Two Down, van Heeswijk banded together with residents of the Anfield and Breckfield neighborhoods in Liverpool to reclaim derelict buildings and transform them into thriving neighborhoods replete with affordable housing, a community bakery, and meeting places for the community. She is the recipient of numerous awards; most recently, the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights program at Bard College named her the first Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

John Gray, writing in The Guardian, takes on Steven Pinker's argument that progress and the Enlightenment are bringing about the decline and extinction of violence. "It may be true that the modern state's monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the 'Holocaust-by-bullets'--the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war--was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million. Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be 'apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history' (the italics are Pinker's). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision."

David Leonhardt takes on the conventional wisdom that college is not for everyone. (Although I thought the conventional wisdom is that college is for everyone.) In his Upshot column in the NY Times, Leonhardt argues that new studies show that college benefits even the most marginal students. "The fate of students like Mr. Escanilla is crucial to today's debate over who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree. As it happens, two separate--and ambitious--recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the last two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don't clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don't attend any four-year college. Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn't, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college. And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students. Roughly half of the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor's degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua S. Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found." What is unasked in Leonhardt's argument is, "What about high school?" It is not controversial that sending someone to college will help people. But does it make sense for us to continue offering free high school educations that are horrific and then charge people for better college educations? Wouldn't the money and effort spent on community colleges and financial aid for lower tier colleges be better spent reforming high school education in a meaningful way? It seems most people simply have given up on high school, which is why college becomes an expensive and next-best alternative.

Justin McGuirk says the smart house is here and that it's here less to make your life convenient and more to gather data about what you do at home: "For the first time since the mid-twentieth century--with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life--the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into that void technology is rushing. That tired old trope of 'the house of the future' has been replaced by what is now called the 'smart home.' The smart home is the network's great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity. It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tati-style mise-en-scènes populated by absurd devices--the smart home is prime territory for farce--but it is also an ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the internet of things, according to which all our devices and appliances will join the network, communicating with us and each other. To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical hacks who question the need for talking fridges and washing machines that you can program with your smartphone ('You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?'). Bruce Sterling argues that the internet of things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service providers. Given that data is the new currency, the internet of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the network--Sterling focuses on the 'big five' of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft--to gain control of as much human data as physically possible. As the primary interface of the internet of things, the smart home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising out of the ground and into every one of our household appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance." And while it used to be that you could strategically opt out of this data gathering, McGuirk suggests that the smart home will just render you redundant. Home, then, is no longer any retreat from the public space.

Virginia Heffernan is wary of the way "mindfulness," an idea brought into Western thought from various Eastern religions, has been taken up by businesses and 21st century self-help gurus: "Mindfulness as 'keeping in tune' has a nice ring to it. But it's 'focused on the task at hand' that appeals to managers, like Jackson, who are conscious of performance goals. Might workplace mindfulness--in the cubicle or on the court--be just another way to keep employees undistracted and to get them to work harder for nothing but airy rewards? In this context of performance enhancement, 'mindfulness' seems perilously close to doggerel from the same playbook that brought us corny affirmations, inner children and vision boards. Maybe the word 'mindfulness' is like the Prius emblem, a badge of enlightened and self-satisfied consumerism, and of success and achievement. If so, not deploying mindfulness--taking pills or naps for anxiety, say, or going out to church or cocktails--makes you look sort of backward or classless. Like driving a Hummer."

Françoise Mouly, in an interview, talks about the relationship between thought and emotion in art: "Often, we separate intellectual discourse from emotional reaction. But I take such genuine pleasure in things that are intellectually well architected. It's definitely an integrated experience for me. Much more than any kind of cheap, emotional pulls that you get in popular culture, when I read a sentence and it's beautifully written, it can bring me to tears. I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books--whether they be books of comics or books of literature--is a window into somebody's mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it's so specific. It's a new way to look at the world. It's as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary's skin, you do get a sense of what it's like to be that person. It's a kind of empathic response when you're reading it."

In a piece on the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcom, starting with facts from a new biography of Mitchell, tries to work out whether it matters that his tendency to exaggerate or flat-out invent in his profiles for the magazine, more prevalent than previously believed, matters. Ultimately, she says, it doesn't. But only because he was good at it: "Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don't invent because they don't know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn't create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell's travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they're so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition. In the title piece of The Bottom of the Harbor, a short work of great subtlety about the ability of fish and shellfish to survive in polluted water, Mitchell mentions a small area of the New York waterfront where, in contrast to the general foulness, 'clean, sparkling, steel-blue water' can be found. This image of purity in the midst of contamination could serve as an emblem of Mitchell's journalistic exceptionalism. He has filtered out the impurities other journalists helplessly accept as the defining condition of their genre. Mitchell's genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named."

Megan Garber wonders what might have caused the backlash against some designer dresses that went on sale at Target this week, coming up with an answer that suggests, as always, that when we're talking about clothes, we're not just talking about clothes: "A common phrase you'll hear associated with Pulitzer is 'uniform'--as in, as Givhan put it, 'part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces,' or, as the Boston Globe put it, 'a uniform of the well-heeled WASP.' Which is ironic, of course: Uniforms are about the constriction of freedoms, and preppiness and WASPiness are, in general, about the freedom that comes with privilege. And clothing, furthermore-'fashion,' in haughtier moments--is most optimistically about the freedoms of self-expression and self-reinvention. It recognizes very little distinction between faking it and making it. If you have the money and the inclination, you can stock your closet--and swath your body--with Alice + Olivia and Thakoon and Marc Jacobs and Marchesa, or with very convincing knockoffs. You can balance them out, as the fashion magazines have taught you to do, with items from H&M and Zara and Forever 21. We live in an economy of sartorial abundance; one outcome of that is that 'style' is something we have come to associate with freedom. But Pulitzer's clothes are, again, 'uniforms'--which are, on the whole, designed to free their wearers from the burdens of free thinking. And this is perhaps the main source of the ire about Pulitzer's clothes: The garments suggest a kind of willful conscription, celebrating what happens when wealth and status are accompanied by an insistent rejection of creativity. It was, and to some extent still is, popular to deride women for being 'basic,' which is to say for loving pumpkin-spice lattes, Ugg boots, Gucci handbags, and other predictable outcomes of commercialized femininity. 'Basic' is a terrible epithet in many ways, but it is also, as far as 'Lillys' are concerned, an instructive one: Pulitzer's clothes are, in this sense, the worst kind of basic. They promise class and community and the relief of conformity. They are marketed to people of privilege. Worst of all, though, they suggest that the best thing one can do with one's privilege is to use it to go on vacation."

This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.

This week on the Blog, Jennie Han discusses how Arendt's and Kant's conceptions of critical thinking help open us up to the rest of the world in the Quote of the Week. Albert Einstein provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In a special feature, Zelda May Bas, a student fellow with the Hannah Arendt Center, recounts our second "Courage to Be" dinner, during which Professor Uday Mehta spoke on Gandhi. Finally, we visit the Hannah Arendt Collection and peruse a number of books dedicated to understanding the character and political aspirations of Adolf Hitler in this week's Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Judith Shulevitz skewers the increasing prevalence of safe spaces on college campuses. She talks of a Brown student who, "alarmed" that a speaker was coming to campus to debate and criticize the term "rape culture," went to the administration and had them organize a competing lecture affirming rape culture and safe spaces "available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting." "The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments 'troubling' or 'triggering,' a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and 'sexual assault peer educator' who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point, she went to the lecture hall--it was packed--but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. 'I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,' Ms. Hall said. Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being 'bombarded' by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material." Shulevitz investigates how "the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma" is mobilized by student activists to force university administrators to censor speech and shut down debate. Colleges are not intended to be safe spaces but spaces of tumult and inspiration. It is distressing how universities have rolled over and adopted safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes in an effort to palliate young people who have been misled regarding the strictures of the life of the mind. When Hannah Arendt wrote "there are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous," she expressed a simple point: Thinking risks destroying and upending your common sense and your most cherished beliefs. All thinking risks negating one's identity and values. Which is why thinking harbors within itself the danger of nihilism. But the only thing more dangerous than thinking, Arendt insisted, was thoughtlessness. While thoughtlessness may appear safe, its long-term consequences are the uncritical acceptance of ideologies. Only the dangerous and difficult work of thinking, Arendt believed, might be able to prevent the rise of thoughtless horrors like totalitarianism. It is time we made our colleges and universities once again safe for dangerous thoughts.

Amichai Magen has a long and intense account of the dangers posed by the rise of Salafist Jihad to Europe. He insists that we stare the threat in the eye, which means first understanding it. "This violent utopianism inspires Salafist jihadism's vision of conflict, society, and politics. To their mind, the Ummah (or 'community of believers') is in a state of total war with the West, 'the Jews', and other non-believers, including apostate Arab regimes and Shia Muslims. This war not only justifies acts of extreme violence against those who have conspired to 'suppress the true faith'--beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions and rape--but involves the rejection of all forms of man-made law, democracy, and the Westphalian international system. Indeed, Salafist jihadism is contesting the essential values and institutions of modern liberal societies in a manner not experienced by the West since the defeat of Nazism." Salafism, writes Magen, is an ideology as was Nazism, one that has both the strengths and weaknesses of all ideologies. One weakness of ideological movements is that their members are not psychopaths: "Reducing terrorist motivation involves both short-term deployment of sticks and carrots and deeper, societal counter-radicalisation efforts. Although their values and conduct are abhorrent, terrorists are rarely psychopaths. Most terrorists calculate their action based on the dual logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. Accordingly, the motivation of would-be perpetrators can be greatly reduced where intelligence makes the likelihood of early detection high, the chances of escaping an attack low, legal sanctions against involvement in terrorist activity of any kind tough and, at the same time, the benefits of lawful citizenship and integration into society are visible and attractive. The best way to deal with a terrorist threat is to prevent its emergence or spread. Understanding processes of radicalisation and developing effective de-radicalisation policies ought therefore to be at the heart of European-Israeli dialogue about prevention of Islamist political violence. Studies of Islamic groups in Europe are somewhat encouraging in this area, finding that although young Muslim men in many European communities often feel frustration and humiliation they have to be actively radicalised by others to cross the line into terrorist activity. Contrary to popular myths about spontaneous internet-based radicalisation of lonely and unhinged individuals, the process of radicalisation is almost always a social one. Peer-pressure, systematic indoctrination, separation from general society and repetitive training--which can more readily occur in prisons, secluded religious centres, remote training camps, or in fighting abroad--are typically preconditions for getting vulnerable recruits to cross the line into terrorist activity."

Sue Halpern wonders after our future in the age of technological unemployment: "There are physical robots like Jibo and the machines that assemble our cars, and there are virtual robots, which are the algorithms that undergird the computers that perform countless daily tasks, from driving those cars, to Google searches, to online banking. Both are avatars of automation, and both are altering the nature of work, taking on not only repetitive physical jobs, but intellectual and heretofore exclusively human ones as well. And while both are defining features of what has been called 'the second machine age,' what really distinguishes this moment is the speed at which technology is changing and changing society with it. If the 'calamity prophets' are finally right, and this time the machines really will win out, this is why. It's not just that computers seem to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives, it's that they have infiltrated them and are infiltrating them with breathless rapidity. It's not just that life seems to have sped up, it's that it has. And that speed, and that infiltration, appear to have a life of their own." Nearly 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that the second most threatening event of the modern age was the "advent of automation." Automation, she predicted "will empty the factories and liberate man-kind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity." The danger of automation, she argued, was that it threatens to realize a long-held dream of humanity: to free ourselves from labor itself. The problem, in Arendt's telling, is that we are at the precipice of freeing ourselves from labor at the very moment when we value labor above all else; the old "higher and more meaningful activities"--religion, family, nobility, tradition, public service, and war--for which freedom from labor might be won have been lost. The absence of meaningful life without a job is why the prospect that automation might actually deliver us from labor is so terrifying.

Greg Beato explores the exploding market for edutainment and the "academization of leisure." "What does it mean when people who can afford to spend their time however they please hunker down in front of their flat screens to watch theoretical physicists or experts on other subjects lecture for hours? Entertainment values have come to dominate many aspects of life, but another trend has been playing out, too. Call it the academization of leisure. It can be found in the live-streaming TED Talks lectures, the Great Courses, learning vacations, podcasts, science centers, brain-training games and retirement communities like Lasell Village in Newton, Mass., whose residents must complete 'a minimum of 450 hours of learning and fitness activity each calendar year,' its website says." Edutainment has long had negative connotations, Beato writes, some of which were described by Neil Postman in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. "In it, [Postman] argued that culture's primary mode of discourse was shifting from print to TV, and that as a result, 'politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce' had all been 'transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business.'" For Beato, the new paradigm moves beyond mere amusement: "In 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' Mr. Postman lamented that a former Hollywood actor could be president. Now, former presidents are replacing professional entertainers as the top-billed stars on cruise ship vacations. Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, will visit with Smithsonian Journeys participants in Gdansk this summer. César Gaviria, former president of Colombia, will be on hand on a National Geographic Expeditions cruise off South America this fall. While lunching with celebrity politicians on luxury cruises may seem frivolous, what has actually happened is that a purely recreational activity has acquired new intellectual ambition. 'There's an increasing demand for meaningful experiences,' says Lynn Cutter, National Geographic's executive vice president for travel and licensing. 'When people have choices on how to spend their money, they're valuing experiences more than material things.'"

Walter Russell Mead offers some plain analysis of the impact of Benjamin Netanyahu's win for the future of U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu's campaign comment that he rejects the two-state solution threatens to "have a chilling effect on U.S.-Israel relations that will outlast President Obama's time in the White House. It will also deepen Israel's international isolation and put useful weapons into the eager hands of Israel's enemies in Europe and elsewhere.... The belief that every people on Planet Earth has the right of self-determination is deeply engrained in American political and moral culture. Historically, supporters of Israel benefitted from this widespread American belief. That conviction cannot be turned on and off; support for the goal of a Palestinian state is a permanent feature of American politics. Americans are, I think, prepared to show some understanding both for the difficulties of Israel's position and the problems caused by the deep structural issues within the Palestinian movement, but it would be extremely difficult to build a long term U.S.-Israeli relationship on the basis of the rejection of Palestinian national rights. There is a minority of Americans, perhaps on the order of a quarter, whose support for Israel is strong enough (or theologically grounded in certain evangelical readings of Scripture) to embrace an Israel that sets itself openly against the goal of a Palestinian state. Other Americans are so worried about terrorism and radical Islam that they are willing to support Israel no matter what stand the Jewish state takes or doesn't take on the Palestinian question. But there are enough Americans (and, additionally, enough American Jews) whose support for Jewish self-determination in Israel is linked to support for Palestinian self-determination in a Palestinian state that U.S.-Israeli relations will be significantly and progressively harmed if Israel's leaders choose to close the door on Palestinian statehood."

Frank Cottrell Boyce remembers fantasy satirist Terry Pratchett, who died last week after an illness: "We live in a society whose culture is driven by fear of death. We adore youth. We pay for science that extends life rather than enriches it. In his life and in his work, Death--'not cruel, just terribly terribly good at his job'--was the final and finest target of Pratchett's satire. In Mort--Pratchett's most popular novel--Death takes on an apprentice so he can have some time to himself. As he learns to appreciate life, so the apprentice comes to appreciate Death.... This twist is at the heart of Pratchett. In an age of fundamentalisms, he embraced doubt, the possibility that a stupid belief might have something going for it, whereas an obvious and rational truth might get you nowhere. I hope that that is the twist he is enjoying today--that having dismissed all hope of an afterlife, he is sitting on a cloud with Jonathan Swift and Swift is saying: 'By Jesus, Terry, I wish I'd written Truckers.'"

Rod Dreher worries that we've abandoned the humanities because we've lost the light: "But I think it's also true that we as a society have lost the sense that within the study of art, literature, and the humanities, there are things vital to shaping our souls, and to discovering and taking into ourselves what it means to be fully human. That Homer, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Michelangelo, and all these great men saw more deeply into the human experience than almost any other, and came back to tell us what they learned, and to help us see what they saw. In the end, I think it comes down to a deadening of the soul among our people--that is, a sense that there is no need to learn or to experience anything beyond what we desire to learn and experience, because our desires are self-justifying, and do not need cultivation."

Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director's Discussion by Michael Lessac

Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country's experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland's violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm

HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #6

HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and Rift Valley Institute.

Free and open to the public!

Monday, April 6, 2015

Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm

The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Location TBA, 6:00 pm

SAVE THE DATE - 2015 FALL CONFERENCE

Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015

The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year onThursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!

This week on the Blog, Lance Strate discusses how Arendt teaches us about the mutability of privacy in the Quote of the Week. American botanist Luther Burbank provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of "The Age of the Democratic Revolution" in our Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Justin P. McBrayer has an insightful column about the confounding and dangerous way schools are required by the common core to teach in ways that undermine moral facts. "When I went to visit my son's second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read: Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven. Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes." McBrayer rips these clichés to shreds, showing how the definition of fact encompasses both accepted truths and proofs, which are hardly the same thing. What is more, in opposing facts and opinions, the common core curriculum forgets that some facts are also opinions and vice versa, thus undermining any possibility of moral facts. "How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality? I learned the answer to this question only after I investigated my son's homework (and other examples of assignments online). Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here's a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions?- Copying homework assignments is wrong.- Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.- All men are created equal.- It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.- It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.- Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.- Drug dealers belong in prison.The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact. In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths." Moral facts and moral truths are those that are at once subjective and also universal, truths that are neither subject to proof nor questionable by thinking persons. Moral truths are shown, not proven, which is why both Kant and Arendt insist that examples are the core of moral education. We all know that copying homework and dealing drugs are wrong, just as we know that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. acted courageously and ethically in breaking laws; we don't need logical proofs or empirical studies to make moral judgments with conviction. And yet, increasingly our scientific age insists that truths are only those statements subject to logical or empirical proof, thus denying the very existence of moral facts and undermining the ethical foundation of the common world in which we live. The attack on ethical reality goes beyond our schools. It is not only the common core that denies the existence of moral truths; it is a Schande when the Federal Government imposes a curriculum that teaches our children that all opinion is false and only what is provable is true.

Peter Maass has two related essays in The Intercept about the two-tiered system of justice for leakers. In a long and revealing essay about Stephen Kim--a mid-level government analyst who leaked classified information to the journalist James Rosen--Maass focuses on the selective nature of the prosecution: "Kim had the particular misfortune of being a mid-level official. Senior officials tend to have powerful allies who can push back against the Department of Justice. This doesn't always protect them--Scooter Libby, who was Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted in 2007 of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name (though his sentence was later commuted by President Bush). But usually it helps. Top officials who have not been prosecuted for leaking include Leon Panetta, the former CIA director who, according to a report by the Defense Department's inspector general, leaked the name of the SEAL commando who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Another example is Gen. James Cartwright, who reportedly has been investigated as the source for a Times story on Stuxnet, but has not been charged. And of course there is David Petraeus, the former CIA director and four-star general who is being investigated for leaking classified information to Paula Broadwell, his former lover and authorized biographer. According to recent press reports, lawyers in the Department of Justice have recommended that Petraeus be indicted, but there's significant resistance because he is a popular figure with influential friends who have taken his side, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein and John McCain. While Kim sits in prison for talking to a reporter about a single classified document, Petraeus has not been charged for allegedly handing over multiple classified documents." In a second article written after David Petraeus was granted a plea that not only allowed him to avoid jail but permitted him to keep his lucrative job on Wall Street, Maass highlights the difference in the way Petraeus and Kim were treated: "Petraeus pleaded guilty to just one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information, a misdemeanor that can be punishable by a year in jail, though the deal calls only for probation and a $40,000 fine. As The New York Times noted today, the deal 'allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.'" The point is not that Petraeus should be fully prosecuted but that Kim's prosecution is strikingly a case of overkill, all of which calls to mind Arendt's somewhat mangled line about the public perceptions of the 1963 Frankfurter tribunals of mid-level Nazi bureaucrats: "The small fish are caught, while the big fish continue their careers."

Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a succinct and powerful summary of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation into Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown. "Yesterday the Justice Department released the results of a long and thorough investigation into the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The investigation concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law by Officer Wilson. The investigation concluded much more. The investigation concluded that physical evidence and witness statements corroborated Wilson's claim that Michael Brown reached into the car and struck the officer. It concluded that claims that Wilson reached out and grabbed Brown first 'were inconsistent with physical and forensic evidence.' The investigation concluded that there was no evidence to contradict Wilson's claim that Brown reached for his gun. The investigation concluded that Wilson did not shoot Brown in the back. That he did not shoot Brown as he was running away. That Brown did stop and turn toward Wilson. That in those next moments 'several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson.' That claims that Brown had his hands up 'in an unambiguous sign of surrender' are not supported by the 'physical and forensic evidence,' and are sometimes, 'materially inconsistent with that witness's own prior statements with no explanation, credible for otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time.' Unlike the local investigators, the Justice Department did not merely toss all evidence before a grand jury and say, 'you figure it out.' The federal investigators did the work themselves and came to the conclusion that Officer Wilson had not committed 'prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242.' Our system, ideally, neither catches every single offender, nor lightly imposes the prosecution, jailing, and fining of its citizens. A high burden of proof should attend any attempt to strip away one's liberties. The Justice Department investigation reflects a department attempting to live up to those ideals and giving Officer Wilson the due process that he, and anyone else falling under our legal system, deserves." We should all take a deep breath and respect Coates' clarity. As for whether the local prosecutor did the necessary work or not, I don't know. But clearly the prosecutor came to the same conclusion to which the Justice Department and Coates now come, and they took action to encourage the grand jury to do the same.

In the same essay as he accepts the innocence of Darren Wilson, Ta-Nehisi Coates digs into the Justice Department's second report, the one that found systematic violations of civil rights throughout not only the Ferguson police department but also the entire legal system. Above all, the City of Ferguson saw its citizens, and predominantly its black citizens, as sources of revenue to be fined and cited rather than as citizens to be respected or even to be punished: "' Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the City's focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson's police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson's police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson's own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...' Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson's predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue... The 'focus on revenue' was almost wholly a focus on black people as revenue. Black people in Ferguson were twice as likely to be searched during a stop, twice as likely to receive a citation when stopped, and twice as likely to be arrested during the stop, and yet were 26 percent less likely to be found with contraband. Black people were more likely to see a single incident turn into multiple citations. The disparity in outcomes remained 'even after regression analysis is used to control for non-race-based variables.' One should understand that the Justice Department did not simply find indirect evidence of unintentionally racist practices which harm black people, but 'discriminatory intent'--that is to say willful racism aimed to generate cash. Justice in Ferguson is not a matter of 'racism without racists,' but racism with racists so secure, so proud, so brazen that they used their government emails to flaunt it."

In an interview, Zephyr Teachout outlines what she thinks is the problem with American political culture: "There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power. I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat. This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, 'That sounds good, but I don't believe they're going to do everything they can to build those towers.' Or with campaign finance reform--they don't think that we actually intend to change the way money works in politics. Then citizens don't get very engaged. They think, 'Maybe that politician is just naïve.' Or, more often, people think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter. One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics. What were they thinking in 1900? Were they thinking the American system's broken and we should just give up? Why do we feel powerless but Pussy Riot doesn't? Why do we feel powerless but the protesters in Hong Kong don't? Why do we feel powerless? There is a strange feeling of powerlessness among us, even though we do have power."

Timothy Kudo, a Marine Captain, reflects on how killing for him has become banal. He tells of a time when he was asked to give an order to kill suspected insurgents: "The voice on the other end of the radio said: 'There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?'" Kudo responds according to both cliché and his training: "'Take the shot,' I responded. It was dialogue from the movies that I'd grown up with, but I spoke the words without irony. I summarily ordered the killing of two men. I wanted the Marine on the other end to give me a reason to change my decision, but the only sound I heard was the radio affirmative for an understood order: 'Roger, out.' Shots rang out across the narrow river. A part of me wanted the rounds to miss their target, but they struck flesh and the men fell dead." Kudo trained to kill and trained to learn how to justify killing, how to kill in ways that made the killing morally and physically acceptable. "For a while after I ordered the Marine to take that first shot, everything we did seemed acceptable. It revealed that killing could be banal. Each day would bring a new threat that needed to be eliminated. Bombs would drop, Marines would fire and artillery would blanket hills with explosions. I had a rough estimate of how many people we killed, but I stopped counting after a while." Kudo recognizes a problem here and writes: "If this era of war ever ends, and we emerge from the slumber of automated killing to the daylight of moral questioning, we will face a reckoning. If we are honest with ourselves, the answers won't be simple." But then he ends his essay with this: "I don't blame Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama for these wars. Our elected leaders, after all, are just following orders, no different from the Marine who asks if he can kill a man digging by the side of the road." The retreat to the "just following orders" justification is clearly here out of place. The point about Kudo and his marines is not that they were following orders but that they came to see the orders as right, even if the rightness of orders is complicated. This is clearly also the case for the two presidents. We see how precarious and difficult it is to make moral judgments when someone like Kudo instinctively flees the groundlessness of judgment for the safety of bureaucratic irresponsibility. What he forgets, however, is that in politics obedience and support are the same. The fact is, as Arendt writes, that those who kill are not simply obeying orders; they are supporting the political legitimacy of those orders, which is why we can never escape our personal responsibility to judge.

Parent and public school teacher Michael Godsey praises the private school because it requires students and parents to "buy in" to their education. Students that have a stake in their education, he thinks, are better students: "If the parents are paying tuition at an independent school--one that advertises an alternative approach to education and promotes a 'love of learning' as its cornerstone--they are publicly claiming a stake in a specific curriculum and pedagogy. They're not simply accepting the title of 'stakeholder' at the school that's chosen for their kids because of, say, geography.... I noticed the same effect of 'buying in' when I used to teach Advanced Placement English at another public school. By law, anyone was allowed to take the class, but the school encouraged every interested student to get a signature from a former teacher to vouch for his or her qualifications. The simple act of taking the initiative to procure a signature was enough to show 'buy-in': On the first day of school, every student had made a tiny but significant act that showed that they had chosen to be in this class. This served as implicit evidence that they cared about their education, at least a little bit." One of the most passionate and insightful defenses of private over public education comes from James Tooley, author of The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. Tooley spoke at the Arendt Center's Conference Failing Fast in 2013. You can watch a video of his talk here. (Click on Failing Fast and then scroll down.)

Jessica Gregg, on the other hand, has elected to take her kids out of private school in order to save money but also because she believes that public school students, who are handed much, much less, learn how to make more for themselves: "It turns out that our children didn't need to be one of a handful of precious kids in a classroom. They can handle the bigger classes, the dozens of children from different backgrounds. They can be OK and even, sometimes, great. We've learned that our kids aren't so extraordinarily fragile that they need to be bubble wrapped by us before they venture into the world. We've also learned that they aren't necessarily extraordinary at all. Or, to be more precise, that if they want to be perceived as extraordinary in the public school system, they had better be extraordinary. The school will not create extraordinary for them. We are lucky: The kids will receive a solid educational foundation in our local schools. And they can remain at that foundational level, or they can improve upon it. But it is up to them to take advantage of extra resources or to create those resources themselves. They have to be part of their own educational equation. Seth will be entering a public high school with an international baccalaureate program, classes in Chinese, and the option to take courses at the local university if he is not sufficiently challenged. But he has to seek these experiences and he has to be qualified. His ability to take advantage of these opportunities is contingent on him, not on our ability to pay for a school that will automatically provide them. Of course, down the road, we may regret this decision. We have to contend with the possibility that without the extra advantage that private school gives them, our children may no longer be considered super-special, super-educated, super-kids, zooming toward our version of their success. ('Yes, she'll be at Yale next year. It just seemed a better fit than Harvard.')"

Eli Saslow profiles Daniel Norris, also known as "Van Man," a top baseball prospect who lives off the grid. "HE HAS ALWAYS lived by his own code, no matter what anyone thinks: a three-sport star athlete in high school who spent weekends camping alone; a hippie who has never tried drugs; a major league pitcher whose first corporate relationship was with an environmental organization called 1% for the Planet. He is 21 and says he has never tasted alcohol. He has had one serious relationship, with his high school girlfriend, and it ended in part because he wanted more time to travel by himself. He was baptized in his baseball uniform. His newest surfboard is made from recycled foam. His van is equipped with a solar panel. He reads hardcover books and never a Kindle. He avoids TV and studies photography journals instead.... For almost 80 years, his father and grandfather owned and operated a small bicycle shop in car-dependent Johnson City, and their store was not only a place to sell bikes but a way to spread their family values and popularize a belief system. Play outdoors. Love the earth. Live simply. Use only what you need. Norris spent his childhood outside with his parents and his two older sisters, going for weekend bike rides and hiking trips, playing football, basketball and baseball. In school, he was a varsity star in all three, but it was baseball--and particularly pitching--that most aligned with his personality. Being alone on the mound reminded him of being out in the wild, where he was forced to solve his own problems and wrestle with self-doubt. 'I was a good pitcher because I was already good at taking care of myself,' he says. 'I love having teammates behind me, but I'm not going to rely on them. It can get quiet and lonely out there when you're pitching, which drives some people crazy. But that's my favorite part.'"

Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director's Discussion by Michael Lessac

Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country's experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland's violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm

Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge

Invite Only. RSVP Required.

HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #6

HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape

This week on the Blog, Thomas Wild discusses how the transformation of thinking and acting into works of art permeates Arendt's understanding of the world conceived by humankind in the Quote of the Week. American author and social activist Howard Zinn provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Hannah Arendt's collection of the works of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in our Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down.”

– Hannah Arendt, 1964

“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down,” Hannah Arendt once said in an interview. We are lucky that Arendt actually did not have that kind of memory. Had she never written anything down, all her thoughts, in the moment she died, would have vanished from the world as though they had never existed.

Thomas Wild is an Assistant Professor of German Studies and a Hannah Arendt Center Research Associate at Bard College. He's published and edited several books on Hannah Arendt. His further research interests include contemporary German literature, film, poetics, and multilingualism. He is co-editor-in-chief preparing the first critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Complete Writings in English and German.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Amy Ireland is thinking about a genocide at the level of "genus-cide," the eradication of humanity itself. The threat is not weaponry but technology. And the exemplary precursor is the horse: "In the United States--where competition with the automobile was at its most intense--there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the 1950s only 2 million remained." The question Ireland asks is whether humans are going the way of horses to be replaced by more efficient machines. Will artificially intelligent machines consume humans' fuel? "Far from being actively malevolent, an artificially intelligent agent endowed with enough power only needs to be indifferent to become a murderer. What are we, after all, but fuel? Atoms that can be freely disassembled and reassembled into something else - a thousand paperclip factories, for instance, or a massive supercomputer, capable of mathematical calculations we can't even begin to imagine in our current state of technological paucity. Even the clearly delimited goal of creating exactly one million paperclips can warrant the wasting of an entire planet, for a fully rational AI would never assign zero probability to the hypothesis that it has not yet achieved its goal.... There is something satisfying about imagining a malevolent artificial intelligence that actively wants to destroy us because it fears us, loathes us, or at least finds our existence frustrating and inconvenient. But the notion that something will destroy us out of sheer indifference is much harder to swallow because it forces us to consider the possibility of our utter insignificance. Bostrom surmises with all the level-headedness of a pure statistician that the odds against humanity's survival are overwhelmingly high. The default outcome of our construction of a single strong artificial intelligence is, quite plainly, extinction. His intention, naturally, is to raise awareness of the risks that lie behind this seemingly anodyne technological innovation and encourage governments, corporations or other entities that may one day attempt to build strong AI to implement rigorously tested control measures before letting the thing out of the box. All this is well and good, but it rests upon a deeper anthropomorphic supposition. What if the most radical gesture a flailing humanity can make at this juncture is not to increase its investment in security and control, but to pass it on? What if we are entangled in a larger evolutionary process that we never had control over in the first place? The real question then, might not be how to survive the construction of strong artificial intelligence but whether or not the survival of the human race is a good thing after all." Ireland is right to pose the question of "genus-cide," although her tone is a bit blithe. The threat is not the eradication of human beings but, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, the loss of the human condition, those characteristics of being human like labor, work, action, and (sometimes) thinking. As Arendt writes, "This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange."

Karl Ove Knausgaard was commissioned to travel from Sweden to the Viking's first settlement in Newfoundland and then drive across the United States in order to reflect on the state of America. In part one of his two-part "Saga," Knausgaard offers this insight into a specifically American form of poverty, the poverty of imagination and the abandonment of distinction: "I'd seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I'd never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight--house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster--if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing. Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?"

Peter Railton gave the John Dewey Lecture at the American Philosophical Association Meeting this year, where amidst reflections on philosophical thinking, personal courage, and political activism, he offered a guileless and moving account of his personal struggle with depression. "And what of depression? Perhaps we all know the mask of depression, that frozen, affectless face we catch glimpses of on our students, colleagues, and friends. I can't do anything about that. But perhaps I can do something about the face of depression--its visible image in the minds of our children and parents, teachers and students. Because in truth, we are still to a considerable degree still in a world of 'Don't ask, don't tell' with regard to depression and associated mental disorders, such as anxiety, even though these will severely affect one in ten of us over the course of a lifetime, and often at more than one point in a lifetime. So there's nothing for it. Those whose have dwelt in the depths depression need to come out as well. Some already have, but far too few adult men (big surprise!), and especially far too few of the adult men who somehow have come to bear the stamp of respectability and recognition, and thus are visible to hundreds of students and colleagues. It's no big deal, right? We're all enlightened about this. Then why do the words stick in my throat when I tell you that another theme uniting the three episodes I have recounted from my life, and that has played an equally important role in shaping my philosophy, is that they were all accompanied by my depression. This moody high school student, this struggling protester, this anxious young faculty member--they were all me and they were all living through major depressive episodes at the time. And there have been other such episodes, some more recent. Thankfully, for me and especially for my family who have been through so much already, not right now. Did others know? I don't know. Some must have guessed--perhaps those who themselves had known depression in their lives could see the mask of depression upon my face. But the thing is: I couldn't say it. I couldn't say, 'Look, I'm dying inside. I need help.' Because that's what depression is--it isn't sadness or moodiness, it is above all a logic that undermines from within, that brings to bear all the mind's mighty resources in convincing you that you're worthless, incapable, unloveable, and everyone would be better off without you. Not a steely-eyed, careful critique from which one might learn, but an incessant bludgeoning that exaggerates past errors while ignoring new information, eroding even the ability to form memories. A young man once had the courage to tell me, 'My brain is telling me to kill myself, but my body is saying "no."' Happily, his body won. But it doesn't always. Every year, thousands of young men don't win the battle. We are captive audiences to our own minds, and it can become intolerable." Depression, Railton suggests, is still in the closet, and this causes untold pain at colleges, where, as a recent study shows, the mental health of college Freshmen is at an all-time low--something that will not surprise any of us who teach in this nation's colleges and universities.

In Railton's speech on depression discussed above, he also has this tidbit on meetings: "Oscar Wilde is still right--because the cost of building a society where the people have more say in how their lives are run is still many, many meetings. What is a meeting, after all, but people deliberating together with a capacity to act as a group that is more than just a sum of individual actions, and this sort of informed joint action is a precondition for significant social change. Come together, decide together, act together, and bear the consequences together. We must own our institutions or they will surely own us. As Aristotle told us, one becomes a citizen not by belonging to a polity or having a vote, but by shouldering the tasks of joint deliberation and civic governance. And there is no civic or faculty governance, no oversight of discrimination in hiring and promotion, no regulation of pollutants, no organization of faculty or students to initiate curricular reform, no mobilization by professional associations to protect their most vulnerable members or to promote greater diversity, no increased humaneness in the treatment of animals and human subjects, no chance to offset arbitrariness and bullying within offices and departments, no oversight of progress and revision of plans in response to changing circumstances, without actual people who care spending long hours in the work of planning, meeting, and making things happens. The alternative is for all these decisions to be made at the discretion of those on high--or not at all." At a moment when faith and participation in all institutions is rare and the pursuit of individual pursuits comparatively common, Railton's reminder of what Arendt calls the power of talking and acting together is worth heeding.

David Cole writes that the Senate Torture Report, when read in full, leads to fundamentally different conclusions than most of the headlines and early accounts suggest. Above all, the report blaming the CIA for lying may have missed the real story: "The full story is more complicated, and ultimately much more disturbing, than the initial responses--mine included--suggested. And because these documents may be the closest we come to some form of accountability, it is essential that we get the lessons right.... So why did the committee focus on efficacy and misrepresentation, rather than on the program's fundamental illegality? Possibly because that meant it could cast the C.I.A. as solely responsible, a rogue agency. A focus on legality would have rightly held C.I.A. officials responsible for failing to say no--but it also would have implicated many more officials who were just as guilty, if not more so. Lawyers at the Justice Department wrote a series of highly implausible legal memos from 2002 to 2007, opining that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in coffinlike boxes, painful stress positions and slamming people into walls were not torture; were not cruel, inhuman or degrading; and did not violate the Geneva Conventions. The same can be said for President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and all the cabinet-level officials responsible for national security, each of whom signed off on a program that was patently illegal. The reality is, no one in a position of authority said no. This may well explain the committee's focus on the C.I.A. and its alleged misrepresentations. The inquiry began as a bipartisan effort, and there is no way that the Republican members would have agreed to an investigation that might have found fault with the entire leadership of the Bush administration. But while the committee's framing may be understandable as a political matter, it was a mistake as a matter of historical accuracy and of moral principle. The report is, to date, the closest thing to official accountability that we have. But by focusing on whether the program worked and whether the C.I.A. lied, the report was critically misleading. Responsibility for the program lies not with the C.I.A. alone, but also with everyone else, up to the highest levels of the White House, who said yes when law and morality plainly required them to say no."

Adam Phillips worries about what's inside us: "We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Nothing makes us more critical--more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused--than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism, that we should be less impressed by it and start really loving ourselves. But the self-critical part of ourselves, the part that Freud calls the super-ego, has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive. It is cruelly intimidating--Lacan writes of 'the obscene super-ego'--and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses--the super-ego is reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past ('something there badly not wrong', Beckett's line from Worstward Ho, is exactly what it must not say) and it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about morality, and about ourselves. Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right." In other words, critical thinking is essential, but let's also recall that it is dangerous. All thinking is an attack on the status quo and the common world in which we live. That is what Arendt means when she wrote, "There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous." That doesn't mean we should stop thinking critically, but it does mean that thinking requires knowing when thinking is, and when it is not, needed. That is the moment of judgment.

Novelist Gary Shteyngart spent a week watching Russian television and living like a Russian oligarch: "Here is the question I'm trying to answer: What will happen to me--an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child--if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin's troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane? A friend of mine in St. Petersburg, a man in his 30s who, like many his age, avoids state-controlled TV and goes straight to alternative news sources on the Internet, warns me in an email: 'Your task may prove harmful to your psyche and your health in general. Russian TV, especially the news, is a biohazard.' I'll be fine, I think. Russians have survived far worse than this. But, just in case, I have packed a full complement of anti-anxiety, sleep and pain medication."

Andy Greenwald considers what made the recently concluded sitcom Parks and Recreation successful and what it's legacy might be: "Art doesn't always have to be a dark mirror reflecting reality. It can and should also be a window, thrown open to let in every last bit of possible light. Parks and Recreation never quite resembled the real America. But every episode was imbued with the idea that maybe it could, if only we, the people, cared a little more and tried a little harder. The Wire, the greatest drama of the young 21st century, left us with a tough legacy to reckon with. Parks and Rec, the best comedy of that same century, gifted us with a beautiful model to which we can collectively aspire. I doubt the future will be as bleak as David Simon's vision for it or as rosy as Mike Schur's. The joy of being a TV fan is that we get to consider both. That's not a cop-out, by the way. That's a compromise, and one that even President Leslie Knope could accept. After all, Parks was built on the bedrock belief that opposing ideas could not only have merit, they could coexist. Like the show itself, it's an idea that sounds simple but in practice is anything but."

Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director's Discussion by Michael Lessac

Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country's experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland's violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm

Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge

Invite Only. RSVP Required.

Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape

This week on the Blog, Johannes Lang explores the moral and political consequences of emotion entering into the public sphere in the Quote of the Week. American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In a special feature, we recognize Aliza Becker, one of her Associate Fellows, and her creation of the American Jewish Peace Archive: An Oral History of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Activists (AJPA). And we appreciate Arendt's engagement with Saint Augustine's "Confessions" in our Library feature.

This coming Friday, March 6th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the fifth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapters 10-13 of The Human Condition.

The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

The execution of two NYC police officers risks severely complicating momentum for reform. Daryl Pinckney spent the week during and after the release of the Grand Jury verdict refusing to indict a police officer for shooting Michael Brown six times and killing him. Pinckney combines history, politics, and street-level analysis. He focuses on both "Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, the pastor 'for formation and justice' at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Boston" and more youthful leaders of the protest movement: "The Ferguson movement gathers mostly under an umbrella group, the Don't Shoot Coalition. It includes tested groups, such as the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), founded in 1980. Four years ago, Montague Simmons left an investment brokerage firm to become OBS head. Two very beautiful young black women, one with a crown of braids, stopped at Reverend Sekou's table for hugs. 'Young people will not bow down,' he said of them, and introduced Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton. They started Millennial Activists United (MAU) in the days after Michael Brown's death. In a British documentary about the Ferguson protest, Ferrell and Templeton can be heard discussing how they were going to 'change the narrative' of one evening's action, reminding their peers not to drink, not to play music, and to stay focused. In photographs and news footage, Templeton is the young black woman with a bullhorn, emblematic of protest at the Ferguson Police Department." Pinckney's essay is full of important observations. Above all, he insists we take seriously the question: "What do you fundamentally believe about black people?" Pinckney notices himself scared of Black youths and writes: "I had to ask myself, When did I become afraid of black youth? How had I, a black man, internalized white fear?" In the end, Pinckney suggests that the protest movement in Ferguson promises real change: "Yet the Ferguson movement has promised that the situation cannot go back to normal, to the way things have been. Everybody knows what racism is. The problems needn't be explained over and over. They can't be deflected by saying that Michael Brown took some cigars from a store, that he broke the law and therefore it was proper to kill him with six bullets, although he had no weapon. This is the kind of thinking that racism hides behind. Ferguson feels like a turning point. For so many, Brown's death was the last straw. Black youth are fed up with being branded criminals at birth. Ferguson was the country stepping back in time, or exposing the fact that change hasn't happened where most needed, that most of us don't live in the age of Obama. 'It's a myth that we're a fair society,' Sekou said. 'We have to take that needle out of our arms.'"

In an interview, artist Adriana Varejão discusses what people see in her series Tongues and Incisions, which features, in part, representations of meat: "When I see the tiles with the meat inside, I think that the meat is much more connected with life and voluptuousness than the clean, rational tile surface. It is like the rationality of the greed. It's very, very cold. The interior, which is alive and baroque and bleeding, it attracts me a lot. I don't want to give a text for the painting and what it should represent; I think the final meaning will be in the person that will see the work. For some, the meat represents that every house is an organism. The other day, a woman said it reminds her how during the Chilean dictatorship, they put bodies of political prisoners in the walls of a stadium. And for some people it's funny, cartoonish, guts. Some people say that body is a political body, others say it is a historical body. I say that maybe it's a painter's body. In the end, I belong to this Western historical tradition, which is the tradition of painting meat - Goya and Gericault and Bacon."

Elizabeth Zerofsky summarizes Éric Zemmour's French bestseller Le Suicide Français, the unexpected and extraordinary success of which she ties to the rise of Marine Le Pen and the legitimization of her far right National Front party: "Zemmour traces France's ills to the death, in 1970, of the nation's postwar patriarch, Charles de Gaulle, which coincided with what Zemmour sees as the tragic death of patriarchy, starting with the May, 1968, protests. 'Our immoderate passion for Revolution blinded and perverted us,' Zemmour writes. 'The France that came out of May '68 would ring in the revenge . . . of femininity over virility' He then demonstrates the many ways in which feminist and other liberationist movements wrought damage, painting a picture of the backward morality stemming from the orthodoxy of 'It is forbidden to forbid,' which, he says, has been driving the country ever since. Le père, in his conception, stands for all the principles that a nation needs to thrive--stoicism, sacrifice, delayed gratification--'The father embodies the law and the principle of reality in opposition to the principle of pleasure.' La féminité, in conjunction with feminism, unbound these structures of rectitude, undoing the family. The 'quest for happiness became the grand business of everyone,' Zemmour complains. The outcome of the countercultural uprising was the 'triptych of '68: Dérision, Déconstruction, Destruction,' which 'sapped the foundations of all traditional structures: family, nation, work, State, school.' Once Zemmour has identified the source of the rot at the center of everything, it is easy for him to unpack each successive social and legal development that whittled away at France's glory."

Conor Feinsdorf takes on the "ticking time-bomb" defense of the CIA's recently revealed torture program: "If a terrorist group somehow credibly threatened to incinerate the entire Northern Hemisphere, to murder billions, unless the President of the United States ordered the CIA to rape a half-dozen children, I suppose that most presidents would go ahead and do it. Perhaps some of you would like to debate the abstract morality of that decision. What I want to insist upon is that any such debate about wildly implausible hypotheticals is a distraction from the actual moral questions that our country faces. Extrapolating from the extreme cases is inane."

Jay Caspian Kang considers the place of the selfie in an activist moment: "How could we, in 2014, ever be as impassioned, as militant as they were in those black-and-white photos of the Freedom Summer? By those standards, the cellphone photos from this month's protests will be compositional failures, not only poorly framed but also badly lit and mostly featuring the backs of heads. Millions of them, however, will be published across the Internet, and while most will be either ignored or halfheartedly favorited, the sheer number of images has formed an aesthetic unto itself. The photographer who shot the climate-change march in black and white made beautiful, revelatory images that captured the essence of the march, with the assumption being that the event will have passed once the images are published; that the work will be the capstone to a historic event. The cellphone images from the Eric Garner protests demand no such reflection: There is never a lesson to be learned. Instead, they function like text messages sent by an impatient friend: I am here. Why are you not?"

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge

Monday, March 30, 2015

Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm

Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape

This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch suggests that people's horror at the violence they witness every day can inspire them to attend to things in the common world in the Quote of the Week. Plato provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we look back on a Lunchtime Talk former HAC post-doctoral and associate fellow Laura Ephraim delivered in 2011, in which she provides an Arendtian critique of Ray Kurzweil's writings on 'the Singularity.' And we appreciate a personal library of Arendt's works submitted by a member of the international Arendt community in our Library feature.

As the holiday season is now upon us, please consider donating to the Hannah Arendt Center. A tax-deductible gift says that you agree that an institutional space for thinking about the world from an Arendtian perspective is vital at a moment of thoughtless and predictable debates.

Please donate by clicking the button below. You can also read a letter written by Roger Berkowitz that celebrates all that we have accomplished in 2014 and all that we hope to achieve in 2015 on our blog.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

“The common element connecting art and politics is that they are both phenomena of the public world. What mediates the conflict between the artist and the man of action is the cultura animi, that is, a mind so trained and cultivated that it can be trusted to tend and take care of the world of appearances whose criterion is beauty.”

“The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (1993 [1961]) 218-219

The survival of culture is not assured. In her exploration of culture and crisis, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between objects that are produced for use and those that are produced as art in order to endure. Consumptive life is a part of leisure, a “necessity” of life, whereas art, as Arendt often discusses, partakes in the humanistic task of cultivating a world that doesn’t collapse all distinctions – among people, among realms of experiences, among spaces of collective encounter, and among the ways in which we see violence whether in the hands of fellow human beings or state authorities. This note about violence is not a theme in Arendt’s “The Crisis in Culture.” But it very well could be, and as I’ll assert here, it should be. This is part of our “crisis of culture,” after all, a dilemma for which art may offer some chance of cultivating a humanistic sensibility that is much needed in light of persistent violence within liberal democratic republics today.

Laurie Naranch is Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Women’s Studies Minor at Siena College, NY. She has published in the areas of democratic theory, gender theory, and popular culture. Her current research is on debt and citizenship along with the work of the Greek-French thinker Cornelius Castoriadis and democracy.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Dara Lind on Vox looks into the controversial number of police killings every year. A minimum of about 400 people are killed annually by what the FBI calls "justified police homicides"--but the actual number is likely much higher (see FiveThirtyEight). Within these statistics, those killed are predominantly male. About 50% are white, the rest largely black or Hispanic. But one important difference concerns the age of the victims: "The SHR lists 118 victims of 'justifiable homicide' who were killed while fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest--not because they were attacking anyone. And 102 of those weren't killed with a rifle or a shotgun but with a handgun. In these 102 cases, the necessity of the officers' use of force is the most ambiguous. And in these 102 cases, the victims are more likely than in any other justifiable homicide categories to be black.... John Roman of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute says these numbers indicate that many white justifiable-homicide victims are killed by police who are intervening in a domestic-violence dispute. Broader research on all types of homicide, he says, shows that victim and offender ages fall into a few distinct groups: 'You see one peak with little kids with infanticide, one peak with teenagers shooting each other, and then you see another big blip where the age of the victim and the offender are the same and they could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. And that's mainly domestic violence. So when you see whites being shot by police officers, who are older than their early 20s, that's almost certainly domestic violence.' The concentration of death among young black and Hispanic men, meanwhile, is in part a demonstration that those are the people most likely to encounter police officers. They're the ones most likely to be arrested, and most likely to be living in the neighborhoods where police most frequently patrol."

Marc Parry profiles Saskia Sassen, author of Global Cities, and daughter of Willem Sassen, the Nazi who is now famous for his interviews with Adolf Eichmann. Amidst an account of Sassen's innovative work on globalization, Parry gives Sassen's reaction to the stories being told about her father, most recently in Bettina Stangneth's book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. "But, to my surprise, Sassen hasn't seen that movie. Nor has she read Stangneth's book. And the longer I speak with Sassen about her father, the clearer it becomes that her account clashes with Stangneth's. Willem Sassen, in his daughter's description, is a more palatable figure. A bit of a fanatic, yes. A journalist aligned with the Nazis, yes. But a man whose great passions were theater and journalism. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth describes how Willem Sassen grew infatuated with Hitler in his youth. She tells me how, after Eichmann's capture, Sassen protected the murderer by manipulating the transcripts of their discussions and never going public with the original recordings. (Stangneth found no evidence that Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis.) Stangneth's book also describes how, in a 1991 interview on Argentine TV, Sassen continued to justify Josef Mengele's 'experiments' on Auschwitz victims. By contrast, Saskia Sassen tells me that her father 'did not like the Nazis.' She emphasizes how he clashed with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. 'My father detested Hitler,' she says. 'He detested him.' And the Argentina circle? The dreaming of Nazi restoration? Willem Sassen's attempt to discredit 'propaganda' about the Holocaust? 'That's not what I remember,' she says. In her telling, Willem Sassen comes across as a mouthpiece for local Nazis. He wrote for them but ranted about them at home. The 'ridiculous texts' he produced were 'to have an income,' she says. At another point in our conversation, Sassen says, 'My father was more a journalist--a journalist wants to discover stuff--than he was pro-Nazi, actually.' It's not that Stangneth is lying in her portrayal, she tells me. 'But she was dealing with archives.... She doesn't understand, in my home, what I experienced.'"

To think, Hannah Arendt writes, is to think from the perspective of others, what she calls enlarged thinking. But thinking from the perspective of others means many others, and not just from the perspective of one group. That is Jim Sleeper's point. He tells of Claudia Horwitz, "a spiritual/social activist and interim director of Houston's Rothko Chapel," who writes that the answer to the question, "What Are White People to Do?" is for whites to "put ourselves through some honest reflection and let that process lead us on to thoughtful action ... to dismantle a system of white supremacy that permeates every corner of our legal, economic, political, relational and cultural lives." Sleeper, author of the classic "The Closest of Strangers, Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York," has a different take: "But Horowitz doesn't address those millions of white guys (and gals) who run the gamut from a Zimmerman to a Signorelli. To do that, whites who think and write about race would have to 'peer into' the lives of whites who are perhaps even more deeply angry than we are--so angry they haven't enough words or even scapegoats to lift the sadness that accompanies their rage. We'd also have to discover that some of them are as angry at moralizing, liberal whites as they are at blacks--just as angry as they'd be if America were white from coast to coast, like the England of Charles Dickens, where grinding, gnawing differences in class weren't racial at all, as they also aren't in most majority-black societies. We'd have to understand why the white anger I've just mentioned is taking increasingly murderous and perverse turns that won't be deflected by our moralizing. Start with two contrasting images of generic American 'white guys,' taken from two historic moments less than a decade apart. When death-embracing fundamentalists attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11, perhaps the most telling response came from New York City firefighters and police officers who ran toward death in order to rescue others, not slaughter them." For Sleeper, white elites must indeed learn to think and feel from the perspective of blacks, but they must also attend to the ressentiment of the white working class.

Speaking at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, Chris Lebron says that America, "while no longer white supremacist in the way it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, daily exhibits the visages of a country where public lynching was practiced and Jim Crow segregation was the norm." What is needed, Lebron argues, is a new idea of racial education: "When I speak of racial democratic education I mean something deeply humanistic. When we are presented with facts, numbers, and dates, we tend to think we have acquired knowledge. But more essentially we consider ourselves to be educated when knowledge opens a window letting in a new way of seeing the world--this is the moment when knowledge becomes erudition. I think a significant problem with regard to race in America today is that we have focused a great deal on, admittedly, a narrow range of knowledge regarding American history. These arebasic pedagogical tropes: Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a momentous speech on the steps of the Washington Monument, the Civil Rights Act made racial equality law of the land. But these tropes do not allow us to see the world anew--they are the tropes that now allow us to be comfortable with the status quo, for surely if Martin had a dream and racial equality is law of the land, we can wake up today and go about our business. But it goes without saying that no conversation about the Civil Rights Movement can be complete without paying serious attention to Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. It goes without saying that no one can responsibly remark on the triumph of formal racial equality as law without also noting the concurrent and aggressive build-up of the carceral state and the penal system which disproportionately incarcerates young black men, resulting in what Michelle Alexander aptly calls the New Jim Crow. It would certainly help the cause of racial equality if more knowledge were brought before the minds of students and Americans more generally. But I want to explore another avenue. This avenue is not mutually exclusive to the knowledge-based approach I just mentioned. The kind of thing I've been thinking about lately has to do with something very essential: more than know what has happened in American history to blacks as a category of people (and here I note and bracket the obvious problems with a notion like racial categories). I think we need a better understanding of what it is like to be, to exist as a black person in America. In what follows I can only offer a philosophical account of the conceptual framework I have in mind--my expertise is far from advising educational policy in its particulars. It is my hope that some of what I say resonates here today with those of you who are surely better positioned than I am to think in terms of policy."

This week saw a mass resignation of editors and writers at The New Republic, one of the oldest and most venerable magazines in US history. No other resignation will be felt as strongly as that of Leon Wieseltier who ran the Books & The Arts section of the magazine for decades. R.R. Reno writes that Wieseltier's departure speaks volumes about both American liberalism and America's colleges: Wieseltier could leave, Reno writes, first because "American liberalism is shifting in the direction of a long tradition in American conservatism, one that is supremely confident in the wisdom of markets. For liberal idealists, the new technological utopianism married to the dynamism of capitalism has replaced the old utopian socialism of the bygone era." The second reason Wieseltier is going "reflects changes in the university. A liberal arts education educates young people into a particular way of life, a particular culture. Some of them become virtuosos in this way of life, which means they absorb its animating ideas and sentiments, but can improvise. All cultures need these virtuosos, because all cultures face external and internal challenges that require adaptation, revision, and renewal. The prophets of Israel were virtuosos. Socrates, Luther, Burke, and Emerson were virtuosos.... As an editor, Wieseltier sought liberal virtuosos. (Conservatives were not part of his mix. He was interested only in a conversation about a progressive future.) And when he found them he gave them an extraordinary amount of space to speak to us about things that matter. But today's universities don't train virtuosos. A shallow scientism and materialism has found its way to the classroom. Political correctness shuts down conversation, insisting on sterile platitudes. Conservative ideas are largely excluded, and many of the most important questions facing us today simply aren't posed in ways relevant to our public life (which unlike the university culture isn't monochromatic). And anyway, if starting a company and cashing out as a billionaire is the way to change the world, who needs Shakespeare?"

In an interview, publisher Gary Groth situates underground comix in terms of other art movements from the 60s and 70s: "Zap was obviously part of the '60s-counter-cultural zeitgeist--it couldn't have happened without the larger cultural shift that it epitomized--but I tend to think the whole underground comix revolution was too singular to compare tidily with the stylistic and attitudinal shifts in the other arts in the '60s (and '70s). You can observe parallels in other media: artists like Stan Brackage, Jonas Mekas, Frank Jacobs, and Kenneth Anger were pushing the formal elements of film; Vonnegut, Pynchon, Brautigan, Kesey, and others were emerging in prose fiction. But they didn't represent a decisive split from the past. By contrast, in terms of visual art, I don't see much connection to other artists emerging in the '60s. Surely the Zap artists had little in common with (and I bet most were even fundamentally opposed to) Warhol (who showed his first comic strip painting in 1960) or Litchenstein (who did his first comic strip painting in 1961) or Claus Oldenberg or Gerhard Richter or Ed Ruscha, whose ascendancy parallels the underground artists. Their respective values seem quite different to me. The only art movement that I can see that Zap or the underground artists generally shares any affinity with is the Chicago Imagists (or the Hairy Who) (who had their first show in '66)--artists like Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum. They had a cartoony, occasionally psychedelic cast to their work, but used to different ends, the results of which were pretty remote from those of underground comix. You could make a case that Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had the same aesthetically anarchic spirit as much of the undergrounds, but that too seems a bit of a stretch. And maybe rock was as huge a break from previous pop music as Zap was from previous industrial comics production, but the explosion of rock seems more like a continuation or culmination of musical trends, whereas underground comix was a decisive break from the past--a deliberate, incendiary reaction to the censored blandness of comics over the previous 15 years. So it seems to me that the Zap crew was somehow part of but apart from their countercultural brethren in the other arts."

Freddie de Boer admits to being suspicious of crowdfunding: "After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what's being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn't just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable but determining if they're responsible and plausible--capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them within the time frames and budgets stipulated. It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we've turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we're consistently surprised that it doesn't work out. 401(k)s aren't crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn't they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense? It's worth pointing out that crowdsourcing was first introduced for simplistic tasks that a human can do better than a machine, often through rote repetition--bilingual speakers checking machine translation, for example, a task still far better performed by humans than machines. (Yes, folks.) But now, we seem to expect to hand tons of essential tasks off to computers and crowds, and in many cases, we don't bother to check and see how well they're actually doing because the hype about both is so loud."

This week on the Blog, Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen discusses how the absence of experience leads philosophy and ideology into useless abstractions that ignore the reality of human interactions in the Quote of the Week. Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we look back on a lecture Roger Berkowitz gave on the relationship between revenge and justice. And we appreciate two passages on Nietzsche that Arendt found worthy of annotation in our Library feature.

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The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

In her personal library, Hannah Arendt had this copy of Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, a book which helped to restore Nietzsche's prominence in the study of philosophy following the events of the Second World War. As we can see in the photographs below, Arendt found two passages sufficiently interesting to note them in her reading. The first section is as follows:

Great power reveals itself in self-mastery. While a weak state may kill off all dissenters, a strong state should be able to tolerate them.

The second passage reads:

"Giving style" to one's character--a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own nature and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.